by Brad Warner

I’m almost done with an e-book that will be titled Hardcore Zen Strikes Again! and will consist mainly of articles I wrote back in the early 2000’s for my first website. Most of these articles haven’t been available since around 2003 when I took them off the web in anticipation of the release of my book Hardcore Zen. I’ve added new introductions and afterwords to each of the articles as well as a new introduction and afterword to the book as a whole. Plus I’ve also included a chapter that was cut out of Hardcore Zen and an article I wrote for a magazine I’ll bet none of you out there has ever even heard of.

And there’ll be another new item soon too. People started talking about an audio book version of Hardcore Zen almost as soon as the book was released. But nobody ever did anything. Around a year and a half a go a small record label approached me with a concrete offer to do the audio book. When I mentioned this to the publishers of the printed book, they were like, “Don’t do it with them! We’ll do an audio book!” OK, said I, let’s do it.

Then I waited, and waited, and waited some more. After about six months of this I asked the publishers what was going on. “We don’t wanna do it anymore,” they said.

Oh. OK. Thanks for letting me know, I replied.

So I decided to do it myself. My friend Pirooz Kaleyah, director of Shoplifting from American Apparel, gave me a microphone. I plugged it into my MacBook, opened up Garage Band and started reading the book out loud. It’s a pretty D.I.Y. thing, but it sounds good. Almost professional!

I added some of the actual music I talk about in the text and a few other surprises to try to give a bit of extra value to people who’ve already read the book. I’ll be plugging both of these like mad here once they’re done.

***

OK. So what about the subject of “spiritual tourism” and “spiritual journalism” mentioned in the title of this piece?

The response my last blog posting got me started thinking about the difference between what I think of as spiritual tourism and spiritual journalism and actual Buddhist practice. I need to be clear from the outset: Spiritual tourism and journalism are not bad things. In fact I appreciate them. Especially some of the journalism that’s being produced these days. But I think a lot of people are getting confused and think that they’re the same thing as Buddhist practice. Or they appear to think that Buddhist practice in the 21st century ought to resemble spiritual tourism and journalism more.

Spiritual tourism and journalism both involve going out into the big wide world and sampling a little bit of a lot of different types of spiritual practices. In the case of spiritual journalism it’s essential to do this. A person who wishes to write about a wide variety of spiritual practices needs to know about a wide variety of spiritual practices. She needs to read about them and to experience them. She needs to know the differences between them and the historical reasons for those differences.

In the case of spiritual tourism, it’s perfectly acceptable to go around to various spiritual centers and suchlike and see what’s out there.

But in doing either of these activities, it is impossible to get any real depth of experience in any of the the spiritual practices you sample. You cannot get deeply and fully into a practice that takes decades to develop by taking a weekend retreat or a week-long retreat or a month-long retreat. You sure can’t get that by stopping by for the Saturday morning service a few times.

In my case, I chose a different path. But this is kind of the way I like to do things. For example, ever since I was a little kid I wanted to go to Japan. When I became an adult I figured it was at last possible for me to really go there. But I didn’t want to experience Japan as a tourist. I didn’t want to run over there and spend a week gawking at the sights in various cities. I wanted to deeply experience Japan. And to do that I had to live there, full time, for at least a year, I figured.

I found a way to do that by joining the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) program. And after that I really immersed myself by getting a job at Tsuburaya Productions, a company one could argue is an important producer of Japanese culture. I lived in a Japanese house, married a Japanese woman, and I spoke and read Japanese every single day for eleven years. It was about the Japanese-est Japan experience one could have.

I took this even further by limiting my Japan focus even more narrowly. In my decade-plus of living in Japan I rarely left Tokyo and its suburbs. I loved Tokyo and wanted to thoroughly experience just that one city. In order to do so, I had to limit my experience of the rest of Japan. I visited Osaka and Kyoto and Sapporo and a few other cities. But those were tourist excursions. I lived in Tokyo.

I’m not trying to say I’m a better person than someone who just visits Japan, or that I’m harder or tougher or whatever. But I am saying that my experience of Japan was almost entirely different from the kind of experience you get as a tourist.

In terms of Buddhist practice, you really need this kind of immersion. You have to pick one teacher and stick with that teacher for a long time. In doing so, you learn your teacher’s ways very thoroughly. But you necessarily miss out on having what one might call a “well-rounded understanding” of Buddhism as a whole.

I’ve taken some flak from people who think it’s a terrible thing that I don’t know much about Buddhism beyond what I learned from my two teachers. And if I were trying to be a spiritual journalist, maybe they’d have a point. But I’m not. I realize that by writing a blog I tend to invite people to think of me that way. I believe I’ve made it clear on a number of occasions that I’m not a journalist. But I don’t expect every one to read every last bit of writing I put up on the Interwebs.

That doesn’t mean I have no right to talk about the other things I see going on out there. It’s just that my perspective is that of a practitioner, not that of a journalist.

The fact that I have such a narrow focus in terms of Buddhism does not make me unique at all. It makes me an oddity to those who mistake me for a spiritual journalist. But among Buddhists, it’s perfectly normal. In fact, when I go to places like Tassajara I see it even more clearly. A student of San Francisco Zen Center teacher Norman Fischer, for example, will often be almost completely ignorant of the teachings of San Francisco Zen Center teachers Steve Stuckey or Reb Anderson. The focus is that narrow, even though they often live right next to each other in the same gosh darned temple. This is very typical of the way things are done in Zen practice, as well as in all other forms of Buddhism.

I’ve actually got a more well-rounded understanding of Buddhism than most Buddhists I know since I travel so much. I often end up telling people at the Zen centers I visit about how their practices differ from what folks do a couple towns away — often even when the temples in question are in the very same lineage.

There is nothing wrong with being a journalist or tourist who has had a tongue tip taste of all the things on offer from the vast smorgasbord of spiritual practices available these days. It’s fine. But their bellies are so full after all that sampling that they usually don’t have room to enjoy a full meal of just one dish. And that is a very different experience.

140 Responses

If, as you say you believe, zazen is something you do with your mind – a mind that does it's valuable business regardless of what the separate, less valuable, less relevant body is doing – then of course it doesn't matter whether you sit in lotus, sit in a deckchair or suspend yourself from the ceiling while doing your valuable mental thing with your separate mind. But if you believe, or have found it to be the case that body and mind are not such clearly defined, separate 'things' your approach to mind/body in zazen may be different.

Didn't someone awhile back note that back in the day only kings had "chairs" and everybody else just sort of sat around wherever they could find a spot not covered in animal droppings? And to this day in most 3rd world countries people similarly squat where they can, meditating, eating, pooping (yes, after all a toilet is a "throne," too!)commiserating, whatever, including just being tired of standing around despite whether Brad says they can or not.

I noted, by linking to a book all about old India, that the Indians of Gautama's time were very familiar with chairs of all sorts and that, according to the book, much of Northern India at that time was quite prosperous. So the truth-seekers' choice to sit cross-legged had everything to do with what had been learned from yogic practice and very little to do with cultural/regional/economic factors.

So ultimately Zen is just like any other religion, you do it to obtain although you are constantly told if you are trying to become something or gain something that is not "right thought."

Yeah! Ain't that a kick?

You don't take up Buddhism without an intention, usually fueled by the suffering you feel and you see. But the methods of Zen and other sects require you to get beyond intention, which is replaced by the direction and momentum of your practice.

All these arguments I read here and elsewhere make me believe that Zen is nothing more than Hippie Catholicism

Busted!

Brad is the Radical Priest and Mysterion is the Jesuit Priest.

Well, Brad is a priest. I have no idea what Mysterion is, but Jesuits tend to be a bit clearer.

Somebody who has no trouble whatsoever sitting a period of zazen in full lotus.

I think Brad is being a little arch and "Zenny" here. The point is that there are three questions: "Who am I?", "What is zazan?", and "What is Zen?". If you understand the answer to any one of them, you understand the answer to the other two.

Hey Weasel Tracks the comments were much appreciated, thanks! I like especially this one:

But the methods of Zen and other sects require you to get beyond intention, which is replaced by the direction and momentum of your practice...So can I practice CW (morse code) and make that the momentum builder? For instance I've heard of people using Art, Math, whatever as a form of practice…ahhh but it is not sitting lotus… or Burmese …

Walking around tonight, a little bit. I've read that the Gautamid probably walked twenty miles regularly, as he traveled between villages. One of my favorite quotes from the Pali Canon, that he liked being on the highway with no one in front or behind, sometimes more than answering the calls of nature. Believe he traveled in the rainy season as well; monks only started taking up residency in the rainy season when there were so many of them that their movements in the rainy season were a problem. Something like that.

Reading something Pat Phelan said today, too:

"Once we are no longer thinking, the tendency is to zone out or fall asleep. I think letting go of objects of mind while staying awake and present, with bare bones consciousness, is like walking on a tight rope, trying not to tip and fall into thinking on one side or fall into sleeping on the other."

I am drawn to the sense of place that precedes absorption, the absorption of thought, of concentration, of ease. The tight rope draws me.

Issho Fujita spoke of finding the mind of the posture of zazen, when he spoke at Sonoma Mountain. I recently wrote this, to the friend in New York who said that when he practice what I describe in "Waking Up and Falling Asleep" he never found his mind below his waist:

"There is a relationship for me between the movement of breath, posture or carriage, and the place of occurrence of consciousness. That's a restatement of something of mine you quoted me, without cranial-sacral theory; either way, I don't experience this activity unless I am "waking up or falling asleep", and the initiation of action is a result of the place of occurrence of consciousness rather than my habitual activity of posture."

I find today as I am walking that Khru is probably right, but more to the point that I like cranial-sacral theory, because it says that flexion and extension at the sacrum affects flexion and extension at the sphenoid and occiput; the pineal in the center of the sphenoid is involved in waking up and falling asleep. So the posture relates to our ability to relax into the place of occurrence of consciousness, the sense of location in space that I find synonymous with waking up and falling asleep. It's delightful to find oneself on the tightrope before absorption, provided one never got on the tightrope to begin with, and it's not necessary.

I also wrote that the ability of the sacrum to pivot is the limiting factor in the flexibility at the hips and the knees in sitting the lotus- and this:

'Moshe Feldenkrais wrote about finding support for the lower spine so that the breath could be continued through shifts in posture. To that end, he recommended exercises to experience the basic motions of pitch, yaw, and roll while sitting on a chair. Hypnic phenomena connected with the place of occurrence of consciousness can initiate all three of these basic motions, as necessary for the support of the lower spine in the movement of breath- and do so solely as a result of the place of occurrence of consciousness from moment to moment.'

Sitting the lotus or half-lotus, one inevitably finds a sense of the location of mind associated with the movement of breath and the cranial-sacral rhythm. Kind of forced to, but since there are few ways to wake up or fall asleep to this in the course of civilized life, I think the posture and the mind of the posture can become an acquired taste.

I think Uchiyama used three shots of whiskey to get the feeling back in his legs at night. Sasaki sits in a chair to lecture, at 105.

When Brad was asked direct questions about his statements regarding practitioners who sit in a chair… (statements that he has made perfectly clear in previous postings) he refused to answer or defend those views.

All he did was give the "Zenny" response:

The answer to that question is the answer to the ones you've posed. Unfortunately I cannot supply it, nor can it be limited to yes or no.

Whew! Lucky for you there are folks out there who think you actually addressed my questions responding in such a ridiculous fashion.

When Brad was asked direct questions about his statements regarding practitioners who sit in a chair… (statements that he has made perfectly clear in previous postings) he refused to answer or defend those views.

All he did was give the "Zenny" response:

The answer to that question is the answer to the ones you've posed. Unfortunately I cannot supply it, nor can it be limited to yes or no.

Whew! Lucky for you there are folks out there who think you actually addressed my questions responding in such a ridiculous fashion.

You really seem to care about my opinions on these matters. But you've said you already know what they are. Now you want me to defend them.

I don't get this at all.

I'm trying to answer you, not provide a Grand Statement for All People. But it's impossible to do that without knowing who is asking the question and why.

If you just want my public policy on the matter, it's on record. And, yes, it is inconsistent. It is deliberately inconsistent. That's because different people (singular & plural) require different answers at different times and because I am a different person at different times. If you want consistency, this is not where you will find it.

Brad sed:"You really seem to care about my opinions on these matters. But you've said you already know what they are. Now you want me to defend them.

I don't get this at all.

Of course I know your view!You stated it in previous blog postings!It's titled Sitting in Chairs is Not ZazenYou told people in sitting group that:

"In other words, I wasn't about to go in as a guest and tell a group who'd been practicing in some way that they couldn't do the thing they do the way they'd been doing it for years.

But I did tell them that sitting in chairs was not zazen. Zazen is a physical practice. To sit in a chair and call it zazen is incorrect. It's not that sitting on a chair will lead you to Satan and cause your eternal soul to burn forever in Hell. It's not evil. It's just not zazen."

And…

So this weekend in Antwerp and next weekend in Manchester, England I will be allowing people to sit in chairs if they insist upon it.

I'll be glad to have their participation.

I won't be mean to them or shout at them or tell them they're doing something wrong.

I don't bite.

I always allow people to do what they want as long as it doesn't disrupt others.

People sitting on chairs will be welcome to be with us and share in the experience in their own way.

But they won't be doing zazen.

Not a big deal. It just isn't zazen if you sit on a chair, unless there really honestly is no other way you can do it. That's all."

You are 100% crystal clear up until the end… It just isn't zazen if you sit on a chair, unless there really honestly is no other way you can do it. That's all."So if you sit in a chair, not plopped, but with both feet planted and back erect, but there is some way you could conceivably sit on the floor – that is not zazen… unless there is just no possible way one can sit on the floor at all… then it is zazen??

You define zazen completely and utterly thru body position.

I'm trying to answer you, not provide a Grand Statement for All People. But it's impossible to do that without knowing who is asking the question and why.

I am somebody who has been a practicing Buddhist for over 20 years. I can sit in the lotus if I desire with no problems. I am asking all this because I find your opinion… and your teachers opinion… nonsensical. You and your teacher Gudo Nishijima are the only ones who say that "Sitting in chairs is not zazen" No other zen teachers outside of your lineage say such a thing…

Not even Dogen says it!

It is very disturbing and confusing to me. Here is your chance to clarify.

If you just want my public policy on the matter, it's on record.

YES!I KNOW!I have been trying to get you to defend your publicly stated view for some time now, but you won't… which then therefore makes me suspect that you can't!

And, yes, it is inconsistent. It is deliberately inconsistent. That's because different people (singular & plural) require different answers at different times and because I am a different person at different times. If you want consistency, this is not where you will find it.

All that means is that there are times and peoples who you would say that sitting in a chair IS zazen… and if that is the case, then why go through all the trouble putting out a publicly stated opinion that is contrary to it in the first place?

your question I think could be reframed: why do they make a person sit 10 days or more of tangaryo at places like Eiheji if they show up to sit in half-lotus, instead of one week if they sit the lotus?

I don't know, has anyone shown up there to do tangaryo sitting in a chair?

Why do they do that?

Why can't they explain why they do that? The Japanese seem to delight in making no attempt to come to Western terms with their traditional practice.

Kobun said he never had pain or numbness when he sat in the lotus. I have some numbness, almost daily. I don't think I'm going to learn to pretzel without numbness by stretching more, or by sitting more. I do look forward to sitting at Jikoji for 3 days or so this summer, but I don't expect to be without numbness by the time I get there. I think sitting the lotus without numbness is a matter of following my pre-bliss, as it were; just to experience the well-being of the spontaneous occurrence of consciousness is enough. The spontaneous occurrence of consciousness takes place now here, now there, as contact is made in the senses. The ability to feel informs the place of occurrence of consciousness, and the impact of the occurrence of consciousness generates an ability to feel.

So he abides fully conscious of what is behind and what is in front.As (he is conscious of what is) in front, so behind: as behind, so in front;as below, so above: as above, so below: as by day, so by night: as by night, so by day.Thus with wits alert, with wits unhampered, he cultivates his mind to brilliancy.

A woman I met was sent out of a zendo in NYC because she couldn't sit on a cushion due to being pregnant.

I've heard other similar tales here & there.

In SFZC there are chairs but not in the zendo, in the outer area. In Tassajara they will allow people to sit in chairs but only after special consultation. Chairs are not available unless you go ask for one.

In Japan, it is rare to be allowed to sit in a chair in a zendo. The very idea of bringing a chair into such a space would seem weird. You do not put chairs on tatami mats in general.

Wow! Delighted to read this blog. I first read Hardcore Zen when I was living at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center in California. My Roshi is (still, even unto this day) Charles Tenshin Fletcher. I don't know what his opinion on your writings (I have read all of your books, and yes, I do read voraciously so I do read "other" material as well), but I have appreciated your directness from the beginning. As a yogasana teacher (influenced by Anusara) and leader of a small mediation group I get all kinds of weird questions and opinions. Just saying, thanks for what you bring and the clarity of what you provide, even when you must yell over the internet.